If you're wondering why it's so difficult for Charlie to get anything on the screen these days, this article by Flavorwire explains what has happened to the film industry in the last couple of decades, and the impact it has had on filmmakers like Kaufman. He isn't mentioned in the piece, but Charlie's in the same class as the filmmakers who are mentioned: Lynch, Waters, Soderbergh.

“It’s a strange time. There’s not a whole lot that any of us can do about it,” David Lynch, who hasn’t directed a feature since 2006’s Inland Empire, explained over the summer. “You’ve seen waves of things go up and down, but maybe the arthouse will be back in vogue, and they’ll reappear all over the place again. I don’t know. It would be beautiful.”

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when Waters and Lynch were doing their most commercially successful work, it was possible to finance — either independently or via or the studio system — mid-budget films (anywhere from $5 million to $60 million) with an adult sensibility. But slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted. Studios began to make fewer films, betting big on would-be blockbusters, operating under the assumption that large investments equal large returns. (Source)